IN BRIEF

As another “caravan” of an estimated 4,000 illegals heads toward the U.S. — specially timed and weaponized by activists for the November elections — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has introduced the “Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act,” which would provide $23.4 billion to construct a border wall, including $5.5 billion that would be available immediately. McCarthy said, “For decades, America’s inability to secure our borders and stop illegal immigration has encouraged millions to undertake a dangerous journey to come here in violation of our laws and created huge loopholes in the legal channels we use to welcome immigrants to our country.”

A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies indicates that one-fifth of all births in the U.S. are to immigrants, and a sizable number of those are to mothers here illegally. The report’s authors, CIS Research Director Steven A. Camarota, Demographer Karen Zeigler, and analyst Jason Richwine, write, “Our best estimate is that legal immigrants accounted for 12.4 percent — 494,000 — of all births, and illegal immigrants accounted for 7.5 percent — 297,000.”

Those children become American citizens regardless of immigration status because of the widespread misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. And many of their births are payed for by American taxpayers. “Medicaid will pay for a delivery in almost all cases if the mother is uninsured or has a low income, though some mothers without insurance may not even realize the program has paid health care providers,” the CIS report indicates. “Illegal immigrants and most new legal immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid, but the program will still cover the cost of delivery and post-partum care for these mothers for at least a few months.”

CIS puts the price tag for these births at “roughly $5.3 billion — $2.4 billion of which is for illegal immigrants.” Not to mention the fact illegal immigration as a whole costs upwards of $300 billion annually.

That kind of puts the wall in perspective.

So while the Leftmedia is focused on the caravan, the real problem is far more interwoven into our system, and it will be much harder to solve.

“In the first week of November 2017, YouGov polled 1,500 Americans about their attitudes on the matter, on behalf of The Economist,” according to the report. “In the final week of September 2018, it conducted a similar poll again. When it came to questions about the consequences of sexual assault and misconduct, there was a small but clear shift against victims.” By the numbers:

The share of American adults responding that men who sexually harassed women at work 20 years ago should keep their jobs has risen from 28% to 36%. The proportion who think that women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve has grown from 29% to 31%. And 18% of Americans now think that false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished, compared with 13% in November last year.

Paradoxically, it’s females, not males, who are most responsible for these shifts. As the report adds: “Surprisingly, these changes in opinion against victims have been slightly stronger among women than men. Rather than breaking along gendered lines, the #MeToo divide increasingly appears to be a partisan one. On each of these three questions, the gap between Trump and Clinton voters is at least six times greater than the one between genders.” The partisan divide is routine in this polarized political atmosphere — not to mention also quite ironic given the Clintons’ licentious history — but the fact that women appear to be growing more hesitant to cast stones suggests more of them view the #MeToo movement as sophomoric and even deleterious given the rather significant lack of due process.

Even The Economist deserves some scrutiny. It uses the word “victims” three times, including in the title — “American opinion has shifted against victims” — yet the more appropriate term would be “accusers.” A victim implies the existence of concrete and/or corroborative evidence. But that’s oftentimes not the case. Just this week we learned that a male student is taking legal action against Pittsburgh’s Seneca Valley School District after some fellow female classmates accused him of crimes he didn’t commit. A tape exists in which the girls, who claimed they were sexually assaulted, concede it was all a hoax. The reason? In their own words, “I just don’t like him” and “[I] would do anything to get him expelled.”

This is why we have due process — because the idea that “women almost never lie about rape is a lie.” Except even in the Pittsburgh example it came too late. The male student faced expulsion and even imprisonment before the tape exonerated him. Yet he can’t erase the harrowing experience, and his reputation is irreparably tarnished. Yet a growing chorus of leftists want due process abolished because it supposedly undermines the #MeToo movement. By the way, the accusers — or “victims,” as The Economist would prefer to call them — at the school remain unpunished.

The concept of #MeToo absolutely should be applauded. The problem is that the movement itself has devolved into a no-questions-asked morass wherein presumptions are treated as facts. It has been used by celebrities and politicians alike to paint a broad brush that unfairly portrays the situation. In truth, false allegations are likely to be just as hellish as real ones. Finally, it’s worth pondering what this poll would look like in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh witch hunt.

FEATURED ANALYSIS

At a recent Make America Great Again rally in Iowa, President Donald Trump stirred up the crowd by announcing that his administration had lifted the ban on the year-round production of E15 gas — fuel blended with 15% ethanol. That the news was revealed in Iowa is no coincidence: The state is host to a first-in-the-nation presidential caucus and holds six electoral votes that could make all the difference in 2020’s race to 270 electoral votes.

Also cheering for the president’s decision were Iowa’s two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, who responded by writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Biofuels are a part of everyday life in Iowa, the top corn- and ethanol-producing state in the U.S.,” the pair noted. “Ethanol supports more than 43,000 Iowa-based jobs and 350,000 jobs throughout the country, directly and indirectly. Ethanol contributed $44.4 billion to gross domestic product and $5 billion in federal tax revenue in 2017.”

So this is really about Making Iowa (and other Corn Belt states) Great Again, not America. Fair enough for two Hawkeye senators, but their ensuing dishonesty deserves to be challenged.

The Grassley-Ernst op-ed descended into frankly Orwellian terms, boasting of the “competition” brought by ethanol and lauding Trump’s move to undo an “Obama-era regulation” that “hinders consumer choice at the pump” and “deprived consumers of the ability to make their own fuel choices.” They claim that “consumer demand” should by all rights drive up the use of ethanol.

Yet all of that is exactly the opposite of reality. An onerous government mandate drives the use of ethanol, not consumer demand. And while Trump is technically “easing” a regulation to allow for year-round E15 sales, he’s actually boosting the overall Renewable Fuel Standard — one of the biggest and most draconian regulations in government. If consumers want gas with no ethanol, it’s tough to find. Only about 11% of gas stations in the U.S. offer pure gasoline, and it’s always significantly more expensive than its less-efficient, more-corrosive, ethanol-infused cousin.

No wonder Grassley fought so hard to save Brett Kavanaugh. The president got his Supreme Court justice, and Grassley ended up looking like the best friend Iowa farmers ever had.

But in order to truly drain the swamp, Republicans must occasionally gore their own oxen.

Our own Louis DeBroux recently wrote, “This move is entirely political. In fact, after the announcement, Trump held a MAGA rally in Iowa, and that was no coincidence. Between helping Iowa Republicans in the election and heartland farmers hurt by Trump’s own tariffs, the political ramifications are significant, so this decision is, sadly, hardly surprising.”

How did all this start anyway? Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw reminds us that Democrats and George W. Bush joined hands in 2007 to “require petroleum refiners to blend ever-increasing quantities of biofuels, chiefly ethanol, into gasoline, purportedly to promote energy independence and fight climate change.”

First of all, the U.S. is now the world’s number-one oil exporter. We need ethanol less today than ever before. And secondly, putting the debate on manmade global warming aside, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change both agree that producing ethanol is a greater threat to the environment in terms of land use, chemical runoff, lower food production, and total emissions.

Other issues that Iowa’s senators don’t seem concerned about include higher food prices, greater wear on engines that are built for gasoline, and increased environmental impact.

Investor’s Business Daily considers the fallout: “One of the most unexpected developments of the ethanol experiment is the loss of millions of acres of natural habitat to grow corn and soybeans, not for the dinner table but for the gas-station pump. Do we really want to use millions of acres of land for no reason other to satisfy the farm lobby? Equally bad is the use of agricultural nutrients and chemicals to grow the crops. Much of those fertilizers end up in runoff that ends up in our rivers and lakes, causing algae blooms and other negative effects. You pay for that clean up — not those making billions from these crops.”

Add in the billions of dollars spent by Americans to subsidize ethanol production in the past 30 years, and it’s pretty clear that this costly policy benefits only a relative handful of Corn Belt farmers and their political representatives in Washington.

Senators Grassley and Ernst both have a solidly conservative record on many issues, but they’re nothing more than self-interested swamp creatures when it comes to ethanol. And now President Trump is giving them exactly what they want. The president deserves great credit for keeping his promises and taking on establishment Washington, but his ethanol policy is feeding into the very swamp that he promised to drain.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Gary Bauer: “The media complex is in complete meltdown over what appears to be the brutal murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. … When ISIS was beheading Christians all over the Middle East, many in the media were making excuses for why Obama couldn’t do much about it. It took Donald Trump to smash the ISIS caliphate. As Iran cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators, Barack Obama did nothing to make the Iranian regime pay for its brutality. And while U.S. troops were being killed and maimed by Iranian terrorism, Obama and the media teamed up to give that regime billions of dollars. When Donald Trump imposed tariffs on the communist government of China, which has so many political prisoners in jail that accurate counts are impossible, he was attacked by elements of the U.S. business community and the media. But now the media are demanding that Trump sever relations with Saudi Arabia. Several Democrat senators are attempting to make the president complicit in Khashoggi’s murder by suggesting that Trump is protecting personal business interests in the kingdom. Give me a break. While I certainly do not condone the murder of journalists, Jamal Khashoggi was far from a liberal reformer. This ‘media martyr’ was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of Palestinian terrorism. … And why do I have the feeling that if an evangelical pastor had been killed by the Saudis all we would be hearing from the media now would be silence?”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “The political spirit is the great force in throwing the love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place.” —John Viscount Morley (1838-1923)

Upright: “[Bill Clinton’s licentiousness in the White House was] absolutely an abuse of power. Two people made a choice and one of those people was the most powerful man in the world.” —#MeToo founder Tarana Burke, who went on to call Hillary’s contrarian view “tragic” and “wrong”

For the record: “In addition to stopping all payments to these countries, which seem to have almost no control over their population, I must, in the strongest terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught — and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUT SOUTHERN BORDER!” —Donald Trump

Political futures: “Democrats say the most important issue is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump agrees. The President would rather talk about Stormy Daniels and Elizabeth Warren than the economy, and many Republicans have decided that they’d rather talk about immigration than the tax reform and deregulation that have spurred the best run of economic growth since 1999.” —The Wall Street Journal

Braying Jenny: “We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn’t be our original purpose.” —House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Braying Jackass: “Whether or not [Brett Kavanaugh] attempted to rape [Christine Blasey Ford], I thought he was temperamentally unfit to serve on the Supreme Court because of his outburst during the hearing. I saw him lose his cool.” —Jimmy Carter

Non Compos Mentis: “There’s a distinction between citizenship and ancestry. I wish I had been more mindful of that distinction. The tribes and only the tribes determine citizenship.” —Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

And last… “I’m impressed by the moral courage of ABC. They were so outraged by Roseanne’s racism that they … killed her character via a drug overdose so that they could continue profiting off of the brand that she built. Really impressive. Not the least bit cynical or exploitative.” —Matt Walsh

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